With economy uncertain, tech ‘unicorns’ rush toward IPOs

By Erin Griffith and Mike Isaac

Published
2:54 pm PST, Friday, December 7, 2018

FILE- In this Sept. 5, 2018, file photo Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is interviewed after the company's unveiling of the new features, in New York. Uber's net loss widened by $177 million in the third quarter as the ride-hailing giant continued to invest ahead of a planned public stock offering next year. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File) less

FILE- In this Sept. 5, 2018, file photo Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is interviewed after the company's unveiling of the new features, in New York. Uber's net loss widened by $177 million in the third quarter as ... more

Photo: Richard Drew / Associated Press

Photo: Richard Drew / Associated Press

Image
1of/1

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 1

FILE- In this Sept. 5, 2018, file photo Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is interviewed after the company's unveiling of the new features, in New York. Uber's net loss widened by $177 million in the third quarter as the ride-hailing giant continued to invest ahead of a planned public stock offering next year. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File) less

FILE- In this Sept. 5, 2018, file photo Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is interviewed after the company's unveiling of the new features, in New York. Uber's net loss widened by $177 million in the third quarter as ... more

Photo: Richard Drew / Associated Press

With economy uncertain, tech ‘unicorns’ rush toward IPOs

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

Lyft isn’t the only Bay Area tech company that might be speeding up its plans to go public.

Uber has also hastened its initial public offering clock. The San Francisco company had once said it was looking to fall 2019, but has pushed that timing up because of concerns that a recession might be coming, said two people familiar with the plans. Uber could now go public as soon as April, they said. Investment banks have told the company it could be worth as much as $120 billion in an IPO.

The moves by the ride-hailing companies indicate how tricky it can be to decide when to go public at a time when stock markets have been turbulent and the broader economic picture is muddied. Uber’s and Lyft’s actions will carry particular weight with a swath of other highly valued startups that are also preparing to approach the public markets.

Airbnb, the online room rental company, plans to be ready to go public by mid-2019, though it has not set a formal timeline, said a person with knowledge of the matter. Slack, the San Francisco online collaboration company, has said it is readying for a public offering, but has no specific timeline.

“Companies that were talking about 2020 have been told that the window may not be open as long as previously thought,” said Barrett Daniels, a partner at Deloitte who advises on IPOs. He said he was telling companies that “if an IPO is in your plan, I would probably be getting ready now.”

Any stock market debuts of these companies will be the final chapter of the era of “unicorns,” the privately held startups valued at more than $1 billion. Many of these companies, born after the 2008 recession, rode a wave of smartphone adoption, turning businesses like taxis or grocery delivery into on-demand services. They also benefited from abundant capital from private investors, driven by low interest rates.

For years, many unicorns were in no rush to go public because they could grow easily with money from private investors and away from the scrutiny of Wall Street. In 2016, Travis Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder and then-CEO, spoke for many tech startups when he said at a conference that his company would go public “as late as humanly possible.” Employees would be distracted by stock price movements, he said.

Those attitudes have shifted as investors and tech employees have increased pressure on the companies to go public so they can cash in their shares.

“The forcing factor is, How do you deal with issues of employee retention?” said Rick Heitzmann, a managing director at FirstMark Capital, which is an investor in unicorns such as Pinterest and Airbnb.

But the seesawing stock market, a trade war with China and other countries and uncertainty over the direction of the economy are all weighing on IPO decision-making. Few executives want to take their companies public when investors’ appetite for shares may be ebbing.

“Companies that were waiting for everything to be perfect before going public might have been better off going when things were good enough,” Heitzmann said.

Sandy Miller, a venture capitalist at IVP, said several companies were meeting with potential investors far ahead of filing for an IPO, in what are known as pre-roadshow events.

“That’s the only way to really know what kind of receptivity you’re going to have” from the public markets, he said.

Miller said he expected a robust year for IPOs next year, but companies may not want to wait until too late in the year to file.

“There are certainly some storm clouds on the horizon,” he said.

Some unicorns are sidestepping the unpredictability altogether. New York’s WeWork, an office rental company valued at $45 billion, has been widely named as an IPO candidate. But in November, the company agreed to sell an additional $3 billion of shares to its main investor, SoftBank’s Vision fund. That deal has allowed WeWork to push plans for a public listing further into the future, said a person familiar with the company.

For Uber and Lyft, the biggest question they face from public market investors is whether their businesses can be profitable. Expanding a ride-hailing service requires outlays to recruit drivers in multiple cities, which can quickly get expensive. Uber said last month that it lost $1.07 billion in the third quarter, as it spent to invest in new areas such as bicycles, scooters and freight shipments.

Inside Uber, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has raced to prepare the company to go public. For a year, the company has overhauled many of its internal processes, from items as small as creating more formal systems for expense reports to global safeguards that ensure legal compliance in every area where Uber operates.

Going public sooner could give Uber a number of advantages. It would mean raising fresh outside capital, providing ammunition to pursue acquisitions and other opportunities. And it would enable Khosrowshahi to potentially reshape Uber’s board because current members can be asked to leave when there is a liquidity event like an IPO, according to the company charter. Uber’s board has grappled with a history of infighting.

Lyft is likely to still go public ahead of Uber because it has already filed for an offering. In a statement Thursday about its confidential IPO filing, Lyft said it had not yet determined how many shares would be sold or their price range.

Any offering would be “subject to market and other conditions,” Lyft said.